Abstract for God and Country
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ABSTRACT FOR GOD AND COUNTRY: THE POLITICIZATION OF ENGLISH MARTYROLOGY by Nathan Hepworth English martyrology in the seventeenth century developed into a highly dynamic and flexible mode of writing which built on the foundation of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, but innovated in response to new social and spiritual threats. Seventeenth‐century martyrologists almost unilaterally addressed issues internal to England, rather than sharing Foxe’s pan‐European scope. Specifically, the genre became a way for repressed faith communities in England to express their dissent from the Church of England, and for royalists to bolster the restored English monarchy. Over the century, the definition of a martyr loosened and, as the ideological underpinnings of martyrdom became watered down, the application of martyrological rhetoric broadened. Martyrology no longer offered only a spiritual discussion, but added a literary element applicable to a variety of social and political arguments. FOR GOD AND COUNTRY: THE POLITICIZATION OF ENGLISH MARTYROLOGY A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of History by Nathan H. Hepworth Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2011 Advisor________________________ Carla Pestana Reader_________________________ Wietse de Boer Reader_________________________ Renée Baernstein TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1 CHAPTER ONE -- PATTERNS IN PUBLICATION----------------------------------------------------------5 - Historiography……………………………………………….………………………………………….……………..5 - Martyrdom Revitalized…………………………………………………………………………….……………….7 CHAPTER TWO -- DEFENDING THE FAITH--------------------------------------------------------------14 - The Foxean Foundation…………………………………………………………………………………….……14 - Persecution Attacked…………………………………………………………………………………………..…18 - The Quaker Rendition……………………………………………………………………………………….…...36 - Standard Deviations………………………………………………………………………………………..……..44 CHAPTER THREE — MARTYRS OF THE REALM-------------------------------------------------------49 - Royalist Retrenchment…………………………………………………………………………………………..49 - The Royal Martyr…………………………………………………………………………………………………...51 - New Martyrs, Old Story………………………………………………………………………………………….56 - The Rebel Writer…………………………………………………………………………………………………….71 CONCLUSION------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------74 ii LIST OF TABLES - Table I……………………...……………………………………………………..……………………………………..10 - Table II………………..………………………………………………………………………………….……………...75 iii Introduction to the Thesis Early modern martyrology was a literary sacral genre with a heritage entwined with medieval hagiography, but which in England became distinct and separate over the course of the seventeenth century. Writings about martyrdom were always concerned with defining, identifying, and utilizing martyrs for specific rhetorical ends. Through this literary genre early modern churches—beginning with that of Rome—found the necessary leverage to admonish and defend their embattled ideologies. In England that recourse to the defensive discourse of martyrology did not remain the preserve of entire creeds, but was taken up by factions and minority communities within English Protestantism, and of political affiliations which cut across the lines of faith. Consequently, the increasingly diverse positions that martyrology was used to defend gradually altered the genre itself, loosened its definitions, and opened its core rhetoric up to an ever-widening application. To fully understand the emergence of martyrology as a Protestant literary mode, it is necessary to chart the continuity from early Catholic traditions of martyrdom. The Protestant Reformation, rather than being a complete repudiation of the Catholic faith, in fact retained many aspects of the Church of Rome. As Will Coster and Andrew Spicer have noted, “Protestantism in its many forms could not entirely dispense with all elements of Catholic practice,” but “could not be completely divorced from intimations of sanctity…suggesting that the Reformation led not to the eradication of older patterns of sanctity in space, but to a modification of those views.”1 This retention within Protestantism of the idea of sanctity applied not only to places but to persons. A vestige of Catholicism which persisted, then, in the Protestant faiths was the trope of the martyr and the accompanying sacral genre of the martyrology. Suzannah Monta’s research has suggested that Catholic concepts of personal sanctity were appropriated and modified by Calvinist Protestant ideology as a consequence of its doctrine of absolute predestination.2 Arguing that readers of the ubiquitous Acts and Monuments sought its author, John Foxe, as a personal counselor to aid them in gaining assurance of their election, Monta presented an aspect of personal sanctity carried over into Protestantism: the status of predestined election.3 Moreover, she showed how John Foxe used martyrs as paragons of the outward signs of election, very 1 Will Coster and Andrew Spicer. Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe. Introduction. (Cambridge University Press: 2005), 4 – 5 2 Suzannah Monta. Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England. (Cambridge University Press: 2005), 20 – 21 3 Ibid 1 much similarly to the Catholic hagiography and its treatment of saints, who were also assuredly righteous.4 Protestant martyrology had its roots in the Reformation split with the Roman Catholic Church. Prior to the Reformation, the Church employed martyrologies both as a device for recording church history and as a means of inculcating and promulgating official values and morals. When the Reformation divided Western Christendom, those who split from Roman Catholicism adapted the tradition of martyrology to explain their own suffering at the hands of Church officials. The strife of the Reformation resulted in great numbers of persons encountering persecution for their religious convictions, but their sufferings and deaths could not be remembered via traditional Catholic martyrology. In the face of Catholic allegations that Protestantism was a heretical aberration from true Christianity, Protestants needed a way to legitimize their faith. Catholic claims to legitimacy were predicated on an inheritance from the Apostle Peter. Protestants constructing their legitimacy on the basis of ties to an earlier, primitive Christian heritage needed a link between the ancient Christian era, and the present Reformation Protestant.5 Moreover, a discourse had to be crafted which would account for the awkward fact that the Church of Rome had dominated European religion overwhelmingly for a millennium. In order to counter accusations of being a new religion (which carried the implication that it had not been founded by Christ and the Apostles) Protestantism needed to establish a documented continuum of the faithful down though history.6 Beginning in the Early Church and continuing through the middle ages and up to their present day, this continuum would support Protestant claims of having been the true Church all along. The effort at legitimization resorted almost naturally to the already-established trope of the martyr, and the accompanying genre of the martyrology.7 This approach conveniently allowed Protestants simultaneously to justify their own faith, while also explaining away the Church of Rome's dominance over European religion: Protestants would assert that the True Church was the persecuted church, and that the line of martyrs claimed by Protestants would represent true Christianity down through the ages.8 Protestantism was to predicate its legitimacy on being the heir of the early-church 4 Ibid 5 John Knott. Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature: 1563-1694. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 21 6 Monta, Martyrdom and Literature, 35 7 Brad Gregory. Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999), 141 8 Gregory, Salvation at Stake, 139 – 184 2 Christians who suffered persecution under the Roman Empire. Protestant writers therefore set about constructing a chronology of persons who had been martyred by the Church of Rome for conscientious objection to Catholic doctrine. In so doing, they reinvented a genre long utilized to support the church they were resisting. As Protestantism developed in England it splintered into competing communities of belief. Some of these faith-groups became identified during the English Civil War with disparate domestic political orientations. Other Protestantisms were not political overtly, but were marginalized or even outlawed by whichever Protestant faith was in the ascendancy, either in Parliament or in the state church. Seventeenth-century English martyrology thus followed the trajectory of religious experience in that nation, and stepped into the political arena, contending for the legitimacy of political party, rather than a religious creed. The historical moment in which the post-Foxean martyrologists wrote was a period of governmental and religious tumult. Writing mostly between 1640 and 1689, the majority of these authors witnessed multiple successive regime changes. They also experienced alterations in the state church and in which variety of English Protestantism was in the ascendancy. The English civil wars had ravaged the nation from 1641 to 1648, followed by a decade-long